Research: Nearly 11 million legal files were taken down in Megaupload raid

According to new research from Northeastern University, the U.S. took down nearly 11 million legal, legitimate files when it raided and shut down cyber locker Megaupload last year.

For their research, the school looked into the percentage of legal and copyright-infringing content on six file-hosting services. They found that infringing content did outnumber legit content on all of the file hosting sites, but the volume of legal files was much higher than the government would have you believe.

The school (along with colleagues around the globe), examined tens of millions of files that were uploaded to FileFactory, Easy-share, Filesonic, Wupload, Megaupload and Undeadlink. Each of the sites, except for FileFactory, went down after Megaupload, most by their own accord.

In order to see if files were infringing or not, the researchers extracted metadata from the site's uploads using a link checker. The researchers "controlled for several factors including split archives, and then manually determined the legitimacy of the files based on random samples of 1,000 uploads per site," says TorrentFreak.

Titled "Holiday Pictures or Blockbuster Movies? Insights into Copyright Infringement in User Uploads to One-Click File Hosters," the research reveals that for Megaupload, "31% of all uploads were infringing, while 4.3% of uploads were clearly legitimate. This means that with an estimated 250 million uploads, 10.75 million uploads were non-infringing." For the remaining files, the status was unknown or the research team could not agree if they were infringing.

Wupload had a shocking 0.1 percent legitimate files, with 79 percent being flagged as clearly infringing. File Factory had the highest percentage of legit files, at 14 percent.